Why not make Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999) into a cartoon? I've frequently been interested in the idea of sending filmed product into the realm of classical animation. Somewhere on JSVB, I've got fantasy characters of Scully and Mulder ready to go for a Saturday morning X-Files cartoon. While my drawings are too crude, I think the idea would be awesome. Maybe parents with kids would think otherwise, though. Please click here to see JSVB Post #93, which has X-Files character models.
"A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) remains as the gold standard for Christmas cartoons. Filmed years before I was even born, drawn on a shoestring budget with woefully limited animation, it still stands as the most popular Christmas show ever. Residuals for Charlie Brown keep pouring in, making it an unbelievably profitable property given its lowball budget. Producers around the world continually try to match the Charlie Brown magic formula, which is why we get acres upon acres of cheap holiday film. Not much of it seems to be any good, yet Christmas sells almost as well as sex.
That's my thinking: a sexy Christmas film. At least there's no crass commercialism or cloying Santa Claus. Adult audiences would appreciate that. It's one reason why I consider Eyes Wide Shut to be such a spectacular Christmas film. Of course, the dead hookers in New York, the strange and aloof orgies in Republican mansions, and Tom Cruise in general might not come to mind as solid holiday fare as would bell-ringing angel wings, syrupy egg-nog, and Mr. Bean's outsized turkey.
Eyes Wide Shut, love the story or hate it, comes with some of the finest cinematography in the history of film, period. It's such a gorgeous motion picture. Even the minor actors receive a high quality of lighting and camera direction that some A-list stars would never get in their entire careers. To my mind, the perfectionist Kubrick would have made a stunning director of animated films. No stranger to animated special effects, Kubrick pioneered several techniques that earned him Academy Awards. Animators are much more used to working with perfectionist directors than live-action actors, or so I believe.
I started the drawing above in a cartoony style, but in truth, I didn't have a good handle on the character models, so I opted for a more graphic-arts look. If you've ever watched Richard Linklater's superlative animated film "A Scanner Darkly" (2006), I hope that you will see that I tried to emulate that vision. I used an embarrassing amount of Photoshop to post-process the drawing into something that might appear filmic.
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